Pacifism

After the end of the Gulf War, the anarchist magazine Fifth Estate
had a headline - "How The U.S. Got Away With It." This
summed up the left's attitude. Everyone, from liberals to the
far left, talks about "the failure of the American public"
to stop the war. They had put faith in democracy, the public's
sense of morality or the Vietnam syndrome to stop this unjust
war.

The moralistic complaint that "the people let the war happen"
is wrong and simply demoralizes people. It buys the myths sold
by the media and ignores the real ways wars happen.

War is a continuation of social peace by more extreme means. Social
peace is based on most people's acceptance of the "mundane"
daily routine of the modern world. Dull work, television and the
police create a world that is already militarized.

If a country has social peace, in the modern world, it has always
been able to hold wars. No faction of the ruling class has ever
tried to sabotage a war. Jesse Jackson, the premier "black
leader," would be the last to say don't fight in even the
most racist war. This has been the story ever since bureaucrats
of the Second "Socialist" International supported WWI
everywhere they had power.

In every country there is a unspoken balance of power between
the rulers and the ruled. Factory workers will only be made to
work so hard. Medieval peasant would only give the lord so much
grain. And so on.

In modern democracy, the official power of average people serves
to undermine the unofficial power they might have. Polls, voting
and writing to congressmen gives the impression that congress'
decisions are the will of the people. It barely conceals how congress
is instead controlled by the wealthy and powerful.

The use of our unofficial power against the rulers class struggle.
It is Wildcat strikes, riots, sabotage and anything outside the
control of the ruling class. It breaks the social peace.

Class struggle is feared by the ruling class. A riot causes much
more than the damage to property. It damages the carefully pruned
image of the democratic system and gives average people a taste
of their own power. Television no longer seems to be taking everyone's
interests into account.

Class struggle is the only thing that can change the unofficial
balance of power in the modern world. Class struggle can stop
a war. But it is not automatically created by a war.

Vietnam Syndrome

The Vietnam Syndrome is a myth that has been repeated by the media
for twenty years. Another Vietnam would have made the ruling class
squirm but this hardly the meaning of the Vietnam Syndrome. This
buzzword refers to America's supposed squeamishness at fighting
a war with many American dead.

The Vietnam war was a failure for the America elite. This failure
came because class struggle appeared at home, and because the
North Vietnamese were able to inflict serious losses. But American
troops resisting the war in Vietnam was the critical factor. Towards
the end of the war, discipline broke down a lot in the U.S. Army.
Many U.S. soldiers killed their Officers avoided the enemy and
held all night pot-parties. This resistance was one of the most
powerful class struggles of the last forty years. This resistance
also spilled over at home into many wildcat strikes and riots
in the sixties and seventies.

The Vietnam war failed because America failed to get it's soldiers
to act as a permanent police force in Vietnam. The failure came
as the World War II notion of a pitched battle became obsolete.
The system of two enemy nations destroying each other's entire
infrastructure had become inefficient in a world where a unified
capitalism ruled everywhere.

The US ruling class attempted to escape it's failure in Vietnam
in every way possible. It tried to make sure that this failure
was associated with Vietnam and not with American resistance.
And it's media created the Vietnam syndrome.

As myth, the Vietnam syndrome says that the weak willed "American
Public" stopped the Vietnam War out of outrage over American
war dead. This is not true. The war was stopped by the actions
of the active resistors. A million hippies on the streets couldn't
have stopped the war in fifty years.

This myth also plays into a standard American rhetoric that explains
the misery of the average mystified white male worker. He head
that America's failings come from liberal saboteurs - "tax
and spend democrats," "The deficit," "nigger
lovers" etc.. Every strange twist and turn of American foreign
policy was used to stir up more anger in the most reactionary
while convincing liberals that the U.S. couldn't do anything too
nasty.

For some time after Vietnam, the American ruling class did not
want to involve itself in wars that could have become policing
jobs for the demoralized American army. But the systematic confusion
of the seventies allowed the U.S. to reign in all the dissent
that Vietnam had ushered in. At best "Vietnam syndrome"
cost American companies some profits abroad while the government
suppressed dissent at home. But the U.S. finished its "counter-sixties"
operations of the U.S. long before it dropped the Vietnam syndrome.

War

Instead of counting on the Vietnam syndrome, we have to look the
way wars have been fought in the past.

In the modern world, wars have been a double or nothing game for
their creators. On one hand, wars have served to control average
people with the fear from the emergency situation and the "higher"
(racist) goal. There was "the war to end all wars" [US
in WWI] and "Great Patriotic War To Defend The Motherland"
[USSR in WWII], "A War Of Extermination Against The Savages"
[U.S. war against North America natives]. These got working people
of one region to participate in the slaughter of many people from
other areas ("foreigners"). They could then see the
state as their protector.

On the other hand, wars strains the routine of daily life. It
marshalls vast resources marshalled and disrupts many lives. In
WWII, many women went into factories and many came out wanting
something different from the traditional feminine role. By definition,
a war is something that neither side fully controls. With various
wars have come mutinies and desertions. Veterans of the Vietnam
war returned home and often took part in the strike waves of the
seventies. The women who worked during WWII were mainly suppressed
afterwards but the events opened some of their horizons.

Because of all this, war has presented both traps and opportunities
to those who look for a new social order as well as for partisan
of the present order. This is why we should be clear about the
nature of war and the struggle against it.

Anti-pacifist

All this has a larger lesson for those who want a new society.
The working class cannot directly mold the form that its oppression
takes. The ruling class decides whether it goes to war.

Modern war is not a different order. War is simply the apex of
the modern order. Working people who normally have little real
control over their lives are put into an even more controlled
factory like condition.

The defeat of today is people simply going on, simply accepting
the order of the day. Computerized manufacturing and control creates
a world where every worker contributes something to the military
industrial complex. And many don't know how much they contribute.
A computer keyboard can go equally easily into an office or a
tank. Four-lane freeways carry military equipment as easily as
industrial machinery. Road workers maintain both functions of
the road. A programmer may not know whether her program will go
into a vending machine or spy satellite etc., etc..

The failure of the working class in America to stop the Gulf War
was nothing more than it's failure to create socialist revolution.
This failure continues daily. Revolutionaries can't have the illusion
that workers can struggle against only war. A strong anti-war
struggle can only slightly hinder wars. Struggles that shake the
foundations of society have a greater power to stop a war incidentally.

War can thus only be questioned by questioning the entire order
of society. Wars will never be stopped by peace marches, moral
outrage or even blood and guts on TV.

War can only stopped against the rulers desires by the class struggle
that attacks the entire system. But this might only happened at
the end. The Russian government in 1917 continued the war against
Germany until the day it was overthrown. If war is in the system's
interest, it will not stop without a break from the entire system.

The Present War

Now the Gulf War in the West did not fit the general pattern of
most wars. The Kuwait invasion did not result in a "war-time"
increase in the control of the Western nations over their working
class. Workers didn't have cancel their vacations. No births had
to be postponed, except for those professional soldiers whose
jobs already required it. It did not involve a great level of
policing over-all. It merely asked everyone to continue normal
activity for a higher end. Over-all, the war merely showed the
power and limitations of media thought control in peace-time America.

It appears war resistance in the military was substantial in
terms of the number of U.S. service people refusing to go to Saudi
Arabia. It was not substantial in stopping or slowly the war effort.
The war was also a shakedown for the US military, which still
had some lax discipline.

If the war had lasted years, anti-war efforts could have had an
impact but a month-long war could have been done at any time from
1960 to 1990.

The anti-war movement during the Gulf War had as much apparent
strength as the anti-war movement at the height of the Vietnam
War. The army didn't have a higher level of discipline than it
had going into Vietnam. The main difference was that America won
the Gulf War quickly and thus American troops didn't have time
to mutiny.

It is sad to think that capitalism could inflict a million person
massacre without much active resistance. But from native American
massacres to Nazi death camps to the millions killed by cars and
cigarettes, capital's mass murders haves been part of the daily
routine. This is why we must work to overthrow the entire society
rather than working to stop war.

The future

Rulers have normally found short wars easier to control than long
wars. The wars that are now becoming necessary for capital to
fight are more and more police actions. But capital is fighting
these wars mostly with mercenaries. In Afganistan, Nicaragua and
Angola, U.S. was able to fight without risking the less reliable
American army.

The gulf war, as an almost complete fake, was critical because
it satisfied the needs of capital that the usual sort of war no
longer could. But this does not mean that this system won't have
real wars in the future. But in a contrary fashion, these wars
would be hidden by the propaganda machine that publicized the
Gulf War.

In the future, civil war within a country like Mexico or Peru
might force a U.S. intervention that couldn't be controlled like
the Gulf War. But this depend on the increase in the international
class struggle.